Hi all! This is going to be something a little different! The Houses Competition that I'm in is doing an inter-house collaboration thing, where we wrote a story with someone in another House. I am paired with the amazing Magpie, who is in Hufflepuff, while I'm in Slytherin! We came up with a cool idea, using the given prompts (event) mourning someone's life, and [Thought] He'd/She'd/They'd never see it coming.
I hope you all like this!
Word Count: 1175
Betas: accio_broom, VanillaAshes, Aya
Alastor Moody knew the Potters quite well. After all, they both had expressed interest in joining the Aurors, and James was now wholeheartedly pursuing that career under Moody's tutelage.
In the beginning, Alastor found the young man quite aggravating. He was reckless, overconfident, and many other things that could get him in trouble in the field.
Because of this, Alastor had refused to work with James unless absolutely necessary. Eventually, however, Alastor had learned that under James' exterior postulating was a man who was willing to do whatever he could to do what he thought was right and protect those who needed it. Alastor respected that, and gradually, he began to truly mentor James Potter.
James had developed a hero worship of Alastor, but that had slowly changed as they got to know each other. They respected each other and had a camaraderie that Alastor hadn't had in… he couldn't remember how long.
And now the unimaginable had happened. Alastor had grown nearly immune to catastrophe and the like over the years, but this was something entirely different. As he stared at the ruins of the family's house, he sensed the dark events that had gone on the night before.
"Auror Moody, what do you think happened?" the other Auror on the case, a fairly new recruit, Kingsley Shacklebolt, asked as he walked over to him.
"We're about to find out," Alastor answered. "I can feel some lingering magic around the house, but there's something about it—not all of it seems evil."
"They had a son, didn't they?" Kingsley asked as they walked closer to the crime scene. "Where was he taken?"
Alastor shook his head. "I'm not sure. Albus Dumbledore had something to do with it if Remus Lupin is to be believed, but he's keeping quiet about it for the most part."
They made their way to the former front door, which had been blasted off its hinges. Entering the house, Kingsley scanned the rubble of the entrance. "Where do we start?"
Alastor pointed up the nearby flight of stairs. "I'll search around down here, you investigate the second floor. Shout if you see something of interest." His following words were unspoken, but just as audible. Or if you find the bodies.
Kingsley nodded, and they separated. Alastor headed into the next room, the kitchen. Remains of a late-night snack were on the counter, and dirty dishes were in the sink. It was a reminder of the lives lost. These people had just been in the prime of their lives, only to have been cut down far too soon.
Now entering the kitchen, Alastor found the body of James Potter. He was sprawled on the ground, his glasses askew. There was no wand nearby. Foolish, Alastor thought. How could they have been so unprepared? Hadn't he himself impressed upon James the importance of constant vigilance?
Alastor began to prepare the body to be taken away when he heard Kingsley call from upstairs. "Auror Moody!"
Alastor moved quickly, cataloguing the other man's shout as he did so. Kingsley hadn't sounded like he was under attack, and the sound of spellfire was noticeably absent.
That was the downside of wards, he thought, as he passed by the carefully framed photos that hung on the wall. They weren't completely reliable despite what everyone thought and what the evidence in front of him showed, so when an attack came, they'd never see it coming.
Dumbledore had a hand in the aftermath and the set-up, but Moody was forced to deal with the present and all its grim details.
What remained of the nursery was little more than rubble, but his attention passed from Kingsley—the man's jaw set and his hands trembling, but he stood ready—to the body of Lily Potter lying prone next to the crib.
"Did you move her?" The debris had been disturbed next to her body, a faint grey coating of dust smeared across her arms.
"No," Kingsley's reply was immediate, and Alastor turned to look at him.
The war had been—was, he corrected the thought, as it was over now— was long and painful, with too many good people lost. Now all that was left to do was track down the dregs of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named's people who thought they could hide. Kingsley was young, painfully so to be in this position of seeing people that he had possibly gone to school with lying dead in front of him.
"Someone else has been here. See?" He pointed, and Kingsley drew in a deep breath, stepping forward to look where he indicated.
"Not him, then. He wasn't interested in Lily or James, only Harry." Kingsley glanced to Alastor, waiting for his nod. He was so different to James—mellow and cautious where the other man had been full of bravado and admittedly-deserved confidence. James Potter would never grow past the young man he had been, forever frozen in time like on the photographs on the wall, and Alastor would be forced to wonder how he would have changed as he grew.
"Good. What else?"
He had to keep the other man's mind focused on the work. He had to keep himself in line as well. There would be time for mourning later while the rest of the country celebrated.
Kingsley glanced towards the gaping hole in the roof, shivering slightly in the breeze. The sun hadn't risen yet, and the sky was still dark, gleaming with distant stars.
"There's powerful magic here, but I—" He broke off, mouth twisting slightly as he considered the wound in the room again. "I don't know what it is."
Something about the lingering magic made Alastor's skin crawl, an instinctive reaction that made bile rise in his throat the more he tried to consider it. It was something dark and dangerous, something no normal wizard wanted to associate with, but beneath that was an aura of intense love. It was confusing, something that Alastor hated, particularly when he knew he wouldn't find out the answers.
"This will get swept under the rug, and the house closed up tight, so let's hope we don't find out," Alastor growled. Even without Dumbledore's influence, the Ministry would want to move past this dark chapter as quickly as possible.
Kingsley nodded, drawing in a deep breath before he spoke. "I'll get Lily Potter ready for transport. There's nothing else that I can see up here."
Two lives ended forever, a child who would have to grow up away from the family that loved him, and an unknown future ahead of him.
"Meet me out front once you're finished, and we'll get the report started," Alastor ordered, running his free hand along his jaw and feeling the new scars that were gathered there. At least paperwork was always a constant.
Kingsley nodded, and Alastor clapped him on the shoulder in solidarity before he headed back downstairs to finish getting James ready for transport. Afterwards, he would allow himself to mourn the endless list of what-could-have-beens, but for now, there was work to do, so he would do it.